Reporter Laura Morel will spend the coming year covering immigration for Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting under a special reporting fellowship focused primarily on migrant children and families.
Morel has been a reporter at the Tampa Bay Times for the past six years, most recently covering criminal courts and legal trends. She was a 2017 finalist for a Livingston Award, which recognizes young journalists, for an investigation with two other reporters into police calls at Walmart. Previously, she covered breaking news for the Bradenton Herald in Florida.
Morel grew up in Miami, where, she says, “everyone was the son or daughter of immigrants” – in her case from Cuba and Honduras. That background, she added, gives her unique insights into “the intricate challenges this country faces with its immigration system.”
This summer, Morel traveled to the U.S.-Mexico border as an Adelante Latin America Reporting Initiative fellow with the International Women’s Media Foundation. One of her stories focused on migrants at a temporary shelter in Mexico who were trying to decide whether to cross the border to seek asylum, despite the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy.
In 2016, Morel became one of Reveal’s inaugural investigative fellows. The program, now in its third year, offers reporters embedded at their home outlets a stipend, training and mentoring from Reveal to pursue an investigative project. It is aimed at increasing diversity among the ranks of investigative journalists.
Morel’s fellowship project exposed the extent of Florida’s gun theft problem. It was published in her newspaper and on revealnews.org and broadcast on Reveal’s weekly hourlong public radio program and podcast.
As Reveal’s immigration reporting fellow, Morel joins a team that includes Senior Editor Ziva Branstetter, reporter Aura Bogado and other journalists who recently have uncovered children being kept overnight in vacant office buildings by a major government contractor, the checkered histories of shelters where migrant children are held and how a doctor prescribing psychotropic drugs at one of the shelters lacked any special accreditation to treat youths.
A graduate of Emerson College in Boston, Morel is fluent in Spanish.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Republish Our Content
Thanks for your interest in republishing a story from Reveal. As a nonprofit newsroom, we want to share our work with as many people as possible. You are free to embed our audio and video content and republish any written story for free under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 license and will indemnify our content as long as you strictly follow these guidelines:
-
Do not change the story. Do not edit our material, except only to reflect changes in time and location. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week,” and “Portland, Ore.” to “Portland” or “here.”)
-
Please credit us early in the coverage. Our reporter(s) must be bylined. We prefer the following format: By Will Evans, Reveal.
-
If republishing our stories, please also include this language at the end of the story: “This story was produced by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization. Learn more at revealnews.org and subscribe to the Reveal podcast, produced with PRX, at revealnews.org/podcast.”
-
Include all links from the story, and please link to us at https://www.revealnews.org.
PHOTOS
-
You can republish Reveal photos only if you run them in or alongside the stories with which they originally appeared and do not change them.
-
If you want to run a photo apart from that story, please request specific permission to license by contacting Digital Engagement Producer Sarah Mirk, smirk@revealnews.org. Reveal often uses photos we purchase from Getty and The Associated Press; those are not available for republication.
DATA
-
If you want to republish Reveal graphics or data, please contact Data Editor Soo Oh, soh@revealnews.org.
IN GENERAL
-
We do not compensate anyone who republishes our work. You also cannot sell our material separately or syndicate it.
-
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually. To inquire about syndication or licensing opportunities, please contact Sarah Mirk, smirk@revealnews.org.
-
If you plan to republish our content, you must notify us republish@revealnews.org or email Sarah Mirk, smirk@revealnews.org.
-
If we send you a request to remove our content from your website, you must agree to do so immediately.
-
Please note, we will not provide indemnification if you are located or publishing outside the United States, but you may contact us to obtain a license and indemnification on a case-by-case basis.
If you have any other questions, please contact us at republish@revealnews.org.